Loud, crowded and crammed: How moving to the inner-city radically changed me (2025)

As a kid, I never used to leave my bedroom. I was a teenager of the deeply uncool variety. This was back in the bad old days before the internet, when angsty kids would spend their weekends listening to The Smiths and dyeing their clothes black in the kitchen sink.

My father still tells the story of our neighbour who once enquired if there was “a girl inside that house” because although there had been brief outdoor sightings, he wasn’t sure that I existed.

My reluctance to leave the house wasn’t helped by the fact we lived in an outer-outer suburb where the trees seemed to have stalled at the sapling stage and there was a regular waft of sewage from the nearby treatment plant.

The houses in this suburb were cheaply built with floor-to-ceiling windows in a nod to 1980s opulence, which always made me feel like a human figurine in an oversized display case. So, naturally, I did what any moody, misunderstood teenager would do and kept my curtains shut most of the time. Why venture outside when there was no shade, nothing to do, and a near-constant scent of eau de merde? With the nearest train station a seemingly impossible 30-minute walk away (did I mention I wasn’t a sporty child), my 13-year-old existence looked bleak.

Not long after our move to this outer suburb, I wrote a mental screenplay of my adult life: On my 18th birthday, I planned to pack a small suitcase of keepsakes and favourite books, then make the gruelling trek to the station and wait for the first train bound for Flinders Street. Upon arrival, I would politely squeeze past the resident goths under the clocks and head in the direction of any suburb with terrace houses and tiny windows. I would then proceed to live happily ever after.

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Little did I realise that I wouldn’t have to wait until adulthood for this fantasy to materialise. Not long after I turned 15, my mother and I moved to a rented terrace house with tiny windows in an inner-city suburb. Did my years of creative visualisation cause a ripple in the fabric of the space-time? I wondered. Ask anyone in my family, and they’ll tell you we moved only because I changed schools. But this, in my opinion, is far too prosaic an explanation for the black magic I like to think I conjured.

Moving to the inner city as a classical-music-obsessed, pimple-ridden dork was the equivalent of winning life’s lottery. Experiences I had only dreamt of previously were now within reach – cappuccinos on Lygon Street, concerts at Hamer Hall, bookshops where I could loiter on weekends and fool onlookers into thinking I was a budding intellectual. I no longer needed parental chauffeuring to orchestra practice or friends’ houses on weekends because so much of my new life was now within walking distance. And when my lazy little legs gave out, I could just hop on a tram.

Years passed, and I began to look back and scoff at my outer-suburban teenage entitlement. Who did I think I was, moping around in my comfortable home in a safe, albeit far-flung, suburb? But nowadays, I’m more sympathetic to the pains of that teenager. Comfort and physical safety alone are not sufficient for human flourishing. When you’re effectively sequestered in your home due to inadequate transport and a dearth of “third places” such as leisure centres and libraries, you have a recipe for melancholy and alienation, no matter how comfortable and safe your living situation is. For those without a car in one of Melbourne’s many public transport deserts where weekend bus services grind to a halt at lunchtime on Saturdays, the isolation is very real.

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Last year, the World Health Organisation declared loneliness a global public health concern, with young people disproportionately affected. Why is it that so little of the public discourse on loneliness is centred on how urban sprawl pushes us further away from each other, from the collective effervescence that comes from living in a thriving community? Maybe the Victorian government’s current push to build high-density housing in established suburbs closer to transport and services might make a small dent in this scourge of isolation and disconnection. Perhaps we should also start acknowledging that the savings made by purchasing houses in outer suburbs with poor transport access are often offset by the huge costs associated with owning and running a car.

A few weeks ago, I came across a story that the late American author Kurt Vonnegut used to tell about going out to buy an envelope in his neighbourhood in New York City. On his way out, his wife asks why he doesn’t just buy a thousand envelopes and store them so he doesn’t have to go out each time. Pretending not to hear her, he leaves the house anyway. “How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something”, he says. “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Julia Pound is a high school teacher from Melbourne.